THE POST-FLIGHT examination of the shuttle Discovery has yet to be completed, but by all initial accounts it weathered its voyage to the International Space Station well. This should make it more likely that NASA’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, will decide this fall to use a future shuttle flight to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble, a wondrous window into the universe, deserves such a priority.

Griffin’s predecessor, Sean O’Keefe, was reluctant to send a shuttle to Hubble for fear that if it were damaged during launch, it could not be repaired, as it could be if it were going to the space station. Discovery’s flight this month indicates that NASA engineers have a better handle on the falling debris problem that doomed the Columbia, making a Hubble mission less risky. Over the years, shuttle crews have made several visits to Hubble for repairs. Whether or not to repair the space telescope is just one of the difficult decisions Griffin has to make. In 2004, President Bush set NASA on the course of sending astronauts to the moon and eventually to Mars. The cost of preparations for this has squeezed other NASA programs, especially its unmanned probes and research in astrobiology, climate science and other space-related fields.

NASA also believes it must fulfill its commitments to the space station, a joint venture of 15 nations. The shuttles are the only space vehicles big enough to carry the parts needed to complete the facility. A flight by Atlantis as soon as Aug. 28 will take a truss and solar array to the station. The plan is to have the station finished by 2010, when NASA expects to stop flying shuttles.

Last September, Griffin promised that the moon-Mars work would not cut into spending for science programs, but he has since been forced to drop or postpone several projects. In May, the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science concluded that “NASA is being asked to accomplish too much with too little.”

Bush’s 2007 budget calls for just a 3.2 percent increase for NASA, despite the need to fund the president’s moon-Mars vision. If he and Congress are really serious about that project, they must agree to increase NASA’s budget accordingly, even during an election year when there is so much pressure to reduce the deficit. Space travel without space science is not a wise way to expand mankind’s knowledge of the universe.

More in News

Austin Evers, executive director of the liberal watchdog group American Oversight, whose record requests sparked the White House discovery, said it strained credulity that Trump's daughter did not know that government officials should not use private emails for official business.

Click here if you are unable to view this gallery on a mobile device.Almost immediately after the Camp Fire roared through the town of Paradise, destroying most of the homes and businesses of the 26,000 people who lived there, evacuees began pitching tents in the parking lot of Walmart, down the hill in Chico.It also became a place for people...

The White House's move to restore Acosta's pass, announced in a letter to the news network, appeared to be a capitulation to CNN in its brief legal fight against the administration. White House officials had suspended Acosta's White House press pass following a contentious news conference on Nov. 7, prompting CNN to sue last week to force the administration to...